America's Most Popular Music Scenes

The geography of popular music has changed considerably over the past couple of decades. The internet and social media have obviously played a large role. While industries like automobiles or steel still cluster around resources, cheap labor and transportation routes, or high-tech companies cluster around skilled labor and universities, the forever altered music industry now has fewer physical reasons to cluster — musicians no longer need to be near any particular resource to record and distribute their work anymore. And yet, they clearly still do cluster, just perhaps for slightly different reasons. (I've written about the role of place in music before as well as here, here, here, and here).

Gary LeVox of Rascal Flatts performs at the 2012 CMT Music Awards in the band's hometown of Nashville, Tennessee — the leading metro on the Popularity Index per capita. (Harrison McClary / Reuters)

Most previous studies of music, including my own, have relied on data from government sources (like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics) which are limited essentially to counting the number of musicians or music-related firms. But over the past decade or so, new data have become available from social media sites which can provide a wider range of information on the popularity of musical acts and the genres they play.

One intriguing source of this information actually comes from Myspace, which became the go-to source for musicians looking to promote themselves during the mid-2000s. Though the site’s popularity as a social network has waned, it remains a useful repository on the location and popularity of musical acts and genres. In early 2007, at the peak of the site’s popularity (it had more visitors than Google at the time), my team at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) and I organized and collated information on the more than three million artists that were listed. We cleaned the data, organizing it by location, popularity (as reflected by fans, plays, and page views), and key musical genres. Overall, we were able to code almost two million acts to metro areas. Below, I report our findings for metros that are home to over 250,000 people. The MPI’s Zara Matheson mapped the data.

(Note to music mavens ready to jump on our use of outmoded Myspace data: We are using these data to identify geographic clusters of musical acts only, not to find the most popular or cutting-edge performers or genres today. Though as it happens, Myspace was acquired last year by Specific Media, which, with the help of its marquee investor Justin Timberlake, has launched a concerted effort to make itself relevant again.)

Mapping America's Musical Landscape

Map by MPI's Zara Matheson

The first map (above) charts the location of musical acts by metro, while the table (below) lists the top 20 metros.

Top 20 Metros by Total Musical Acts

Rank

Metro

Number of Musical Acts

1

Los Angeles

175,083

2

New York

115,767

3

Chicago

69,963

4

San Diego

46,267

5

Philadelphia

45,508

6

Atlanta

41,747

7

Washington, D.C.

41,518

8

Riverside, California

39,193

9

Seattle

37,224

10

Orange County, California

35,953

11

Nassau-Suffolk, New York

35,584

12

Phoenix

35,293

13

Miami

33,637

14

Boston

32,792

15

Oakland, California

28,372

16

Tampa

28,339

17

Dallas

28,081

18

Orlando

28,037

19

Las Vegas

27,513

20

Newark

26,443

Table data from MPI analysis of Myspace data

Los Angeles tops the list with 175,083 acts. New York is second with 115,767, and Chicago is third with 69,963. The next several locations — San Diego, Philadelphia, Atlanta, D.C., Riverside, Seattle, and Orange County — averaged between 35,000 and 47,000 acts each. Several storied music capitals did not make the list: Detroit’s 22,445 acts put it in 23rd place, Nashville was 34th with 14,084 acts, New Orleans 35th with 13,965, and Memphis just 60th with 7,113.

Not surprisingly, acts are highly concentrated around major population centers on the East and West Coasts — particularly the Bos-Wash Corridor and Southern California (each claim roughly 300,000 acts), as well as Northern California, Atlanta, southern Florida, and Cascadia (Seattle and Portland). Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas are the sole metros from the country’s interior that make the top 20.

The distribution of acts follows population closely, though not entirely. (L.A. proper is, of course, smaller than New York City.) Still, the largest numbers of musical acts are located in the cities and metros with the largest markets and the most well-developed music industries.

Map by MPI's Zara Matheson

To control for the effects of population, this map (above) shows the distribution of musical acts per 10,000 people, while the table (below) lists the top 20 metros.

Top 20 Metros Based on Musical Acts per 10,000 People

Rank

Metro

Musical Acts per 10,000

1

Los Angeles

184

2

Napa, California

183

3

Las Vegas

176

4

Jersey City

175

5

Honolulu

174

6

Orlando

170

7

San Diego

164

8

Stockton, California

161

9

Albany, New York

154

10

Seattle

154

11

Santa Cruz

153

12

San Francisco

150

13

Miami

149

14

Ventura, California

142

15

San Jose

138

16

Tacoma, Washington

137

17

Santa Barbara, California

132

18

Newark, New Jersey

130

19

Dutchess County, New York

130

20

Bergen-Passaic, New Jersey

129

Table data from MPI analysis of Myspace data

L.A. tops the list again with 184 acts per 10,000 people. With 183 acts, Napa comes in second, and Las Vegas is third with 176. Some of the cities (L.A., San Francisco) are major population centers in their own rights or virtual satellites of much larger cities (Jersey City, Newark, Bergen-Passaic). Las Vegas, Honolulu, Orlando, and Miami are tourist centers, which can support larger numbers of acts than their populations seem to warrant, based on the "borrowed" market size provided by visitors.

Mapping America's Most Popular Music Scenes

One feature of the Myspace data is that it allowed us to get a handle not only on the cities with the most acts, but which cities have the most popular acts.

To get at this, MPI's research director Kevin Stolarick combined the numbers of fans, views, and plays for each band and act and aggregated them to the metro level. His Metro Music Popularity Index thus indicates the degree of popularity of bands and acts from a given city or metro across all of Myspace. Recall this index is for popularity circa 2007, when the data was collected. When combined, the numbers for fans, views and plays per metro can grow quite high.

Map by MPI's Zara Matheson

The map (above) charts the Music Popularity Index for U.S. metros. The table (below) lists the top 20 metros on it.

Top 20 Metros on the Music Popularity Index

Rank

Metro

Music Popularity Index (in millions)

1

Los Angeles

3,547.9

2

New York

1,967.6

3

Atlanta

1,241.2

4

Chicago

950.8

5

Nashville

744.1

6

San Diego

500.7

7

Seattle

459.9

8

Boston

431.3

9

Philadelphia

427.0

10

Miami

395.1

11

Phoenix

375.1

12

Orange County, California

374.6

13

Oakland

312.7

14

San Francisco

305.6

15

Las Vegas

304.3

16

Detroit

285.6

17

Dallas

270.1

18

Washington, D.C.

270.1

19

Orlando

249.2

20

Denver

236.0

Table data from MPI analysis of Myspace data

This broad measure of popularity is again skewed toward large cities and regions, though it does not follow population size exactly. L.A. again tops the list, besting larger New York by a considerable margin. Atlanta is third, topping the much more populous fourth-place Chicago. Nashville is fifth, and Detroit is 16th.

Map by MPI's Zara Matheson

To once again control for population, Stolarick recast the Popularity Index on a per capita basis. The map above charts the pattern across U.S. metros with populations of 250,000 or more. The table below lists the top 20 metros, along with some of their more notable acts. (Because our information is from 2007, note that some of these artists may have since disbanded.)

Top 20 Metros by Popularity Index per Capita

Rank

Metro

Popularity per capita

Popular Acts

1

Nashville

604

Rascal Flatts, Kenny Chesney, Johnny Cash

2

Los Angeles

373

Weezer, the Black Eyed Peas, Snoop Dogg

3

Atlanta, Georgia

302

T.I., Yung Joc, Akon

4

Tallahassee, Florida

223

T-Pain, Creed

5

Santa Cruz, California

218

Kottonmouth Kings

6

Napa, California

212

The Federation

7

New York

211

Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey

8

Las Vegas

195

Panic! At the Disco, the Killers

9

Seattle

190

Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service

10

San Diego

178

Blink-182, Switchfoot

11

San Francisco

177

Third Eye Blind, Train

12

Miami

175

Pitbull, Pretty Ricky

13

New Orleans

162

Lil Wayne, Juvenile

14

Memphis

154

Justin Timberlake

15

Orlando

152

Trivium, Cori Yarckin

16

Killeen-Temple, Texas

144

Flyleaf

17

Orange County, California

132

Avenged Sevenfold, the Offspring

18

Oakland, California

131

Green Day, Counting Crows, Keyshia Cole

19

Boston

127

Godsmack, Dropkick Murphys

20

Dutchess County, New York

123

Matchbook Romance

Table data from MPI analysis of Myspace data

Now Nashville tops the list, with L.A. in second place. New York is seventh, Las Vegas eighth, Seattle ninth, San Diego 10th, San Francisco 11th, and Miami 12th. Several smaller college towns which failed to make our population cut-off of 250,000, but have extremely lively music scenes, would rank quite highly. These include Athens, Georgia (home to the now disbanded R.E.M., the B-52s, and Drive-By Truckers) which would rank third overall, and Charlottesville, Virginia (Dave Matthews Band), which would come in at 18th. Some historic music scenes do much better on this measure. New Orleans, for example, is 13th and Memphis 14th. Detroit is lower, however, at 68th.

In a future post, I’ll report on how we used Myspace data to identify the diversity of local music scenes by comparing the numbers of genres they support.

About the Author

Richard Florida is Co-founder and Editor at Large of CityLab.com and Senior Editor at The Atlantic. He isdirector of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and Global Research Professor at NYU.
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